May
09

Performance Poetry / Nautical Textiles

My new vocation as a performance poet is going stonkingly. Two gigs in, I’ve already achieved three lifelong dreams:

1) Make someone laugh.
2) Get nominated for Poet Laureate.
3) Get over 100 youtube views.

A Good Old Yarn

Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham
Hay Brunsdon in her natural condition

Hay Brunsdon in her natural condition

Hosted by outrageously drunk and bawdy poetrix Hay Brunsdon, ‘A Good Old Yarn’ makes the obvious link between spoken word and nautical textiles.

I’m pretty nervous. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to think about what to wear or how messed up my hair is, which makes me feel a fraud since in my experience all performance poets don outrageous outfits and hairstyles. I just want to fit in.

I get to the venue – one of those tiny rooms up lots of stairs,  its walls draped in ropes and boat-patterned material – with just enough time to grab something alcoholic. Only I can’t find anyone to serve me alcohol, anywhere, in the whole theatre, and I feel like weeping in a corner as I realise I’m going onstage stone cold sober. Instead I squash myself onto a seafaring beanbag at the side of the stage and quake.

Dan Holloway looking eccentric and bookish

Dan Holloway looking eccentric and bookish

The first poet is Dan Holloway. He’s a big guy with ringlets, trouser-braces and fingerless gloves, and he beats me hands down in the ‘outrageous clothes’ competition going on in my head. Dan pulses out metrical tales of love under Hungerford Bridge and lonely people locked in houses waiting to Let go. What I particularly like about Dan is the way, in the interval, he so quickly corners me and asks me to perform at events he hosts in Oxford. That’s the sort of networking I like – especially from talented poets.

I’m second. The audience is right there, and there’s no mic to hide behind. I do a spiel about emails that I don’t think comes out too rehearsed and launch into:

And it works! I fly through Thing in the Kitchen with only one glitch on ‘gobbling’, my five minutes are up and I retreat to my beanbag.

Lucinda Murray, a co-conspirator in the Writing Circus project reads a funny-sad poem about sorting through her hoarder grandmother’s possessions. Wrongly, she is all self-deprecating and angsty and stuff. She is also beating me clothes-wise, henna-haired and leather-jacketed.

Then it’s the interval.

It’s the interval. There is still no one at the bar and no alcohol to be found anywhere. I linger so long waiting for someone, anyone, to serve me a drink I miss half of the next poet’s act.

This ‘poet’ wears a grey v-neck and a shirt. That is all you need to know.

Joel Denno is Joel Denno.

And last Joel Denno, a guy I first saw flying his way through the Cheltenham Literature Festival Slam with poems about suited businessmen emerging from the mouth of hell for their lunch break. Joel sports a mohawk, blazer and fabulous green eyeshadow; ladies and gents, we have a winner. His first poem is political, pleading, movingly, for the humane euthanasia of farm crops and weeds. He finishes with a love poem to, well…

 

 

 

 

 

Mar
23

Performance Review: SLAM!

2Kolegas is a small live music venue hidden inside the grounds of the Beijing drive-in movie theatre. (Yes, we really have one.) When considering how to describe it to you, the word grungy didn’t so much spring to my mind as catapult vigorously in its direction; it is the type of place which serves cheap drinks and big dreams and where every square inch of the walls is covered in graffiti. I dropped in for the first time last Saturday night, to attend a slam poetry performance sponsored by the Bookworm International Literary Festival and the Jue Festival. The event featured performances from Luka Lesson, the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion, and Tim Clare, British stand-up poet and author of WE CAN’T ALL BE ASTRONAUTS; Montreal based musician Courtney Wing opened the night, but since you came here to read about poetry, I will with the utmost respect gloss over his part in the proceedings.

First up after the music, then, was Tim Clare. Clare talks like a poet but takes the stage like a comedian; in his T-shirt and scraggly hair, he exudes a very powerful, and oddly endearing sense of self-deprecation. This is reflected in the nature of his writing: his set began with Pub Stuntman, a poem which opens with a vivid description of banging an old lady for a bet. In this poem, and indeed throughout the set, Clare’s choice of rhymes is integral to the comic effect; lines like ‘Her lips are dry, her legs are splayed / She switches off her hearing aid’ are nothing so much as the poetic equivalent of carrot and stick. And yet this poem, when it comes full circle, highlights what is perhaps the most powerful part of Tim Clare’s work, which is the pathos behind the joking.

Clare’s set also included Down With The Kids, a poem so deftly inserted into a comic monologue that we were five lines into it before anybody had noticed; a song entitled Nice And Gentle, Jesus which takes a chance moment witnessed on the River Cam and turns it into the Passion of the Christ; and finally, what was possibly the most impressive rap I’ve ever seen from a man attempting to impersonate famous women throughout history while rhyming at the same time. His set was short, but it packed a punch, blurring the boundaries between poet, musician and stand-up comedian and doing it well. I missed Clare’s solo show Death Drive while he was in Beijing, but I’ll be picking up his book as soon as I can.

Then it was Luka Lesson’s turn. By this point, I have to confess, I was a little the worse for wear: it was St. Patrick’s Day, I had come straight from a bout of heavy drinking, and I had the sort of headache which makes a bear to the face seem like  a cheeky massage. Lesson’s performance cut through all that; by The Confluence, a simple yet incredibly powerful portrayal of the coming together and parting of two lovers, I was on the edge of my seat despite the haze. ‘Half a bird seemed to chirp half a song in half a tree’; he said he wanted to get this poem over and done early so he wouldn’t have the chance to cry, and I believed him. Other highlights included A to Z, a glorious rollercoaster of a journey through the alphabet complete with audience participation, and Athena, my favourite poem of the night, for which I can conceive no higher compliment than that it made me think I was Greek too.

Lesson’s poetry is a heady mix of mythology, political commentary (immigration and racism are two issues which are frequently referenced) and stylistic influences from rap and hip-hop. In fact he performed a number of hip-hop pieces in addition to his standard spoken-word, but I won’t discuss them here because hip-hop might as well be moon opera for all it makes sense to me. But that just emphasises my point: Lesson’s work is a very far cry from the sort of poetry I usually engage with, it was battling the twin forces of exhaustion and alcohol, and yet it moved me. It opened me up and invited itself in.

SLAM! was the first spoken word event I have ever attended. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person, but I have to say I couldn’t have chosen two better poets to take my slam cherry if I’d tried. Between Tim and his ukelele and Luka and his hair–I’m convinced it’s a sentient being that just happens to live on him–I was introduced to the big wide world of performance poetry with a maximum of magic and a minimum of mess. If either of them ever comes back to China, I’ll be in the first row at their shows. And I learnt another important lesson that night too, one just as important as the literature: don’t challenge the Australian Slam Poetry Champion at foosball. He will rock your socks every time.